YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrea Elliott

lines on the record: 60
first: 2022-02-11
most recent: 2022-02-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Dasani was homeless. That moratorium in New York State has been lifted just now, a week ago. And I think we're going to see a return to a spike in numbers. And so I think that you see right there a lot. You learn a lot by looking at the impact of those two governmental interventions and how they have changed the lives in the interim of poor children.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, a couple of interesting things to say about the pandemic is that it created relief programs that we have seen in studies that have come out have actually been very beneficial to children like Desani. So one is this child tax credit that is just a basic income that has lifted on average about three and a half million children out of poverty every month since in the last under a year since it began, which tells you a lot because studies of those families that are receiving that cash show that they're spending it on the right things, they're spending it on things like clothing and food and paying bills and not on things like beer. So that's, I think, a very striking piece. That paused evictions and brought the homeless numbers down in New York so that we were around 15,000 kids in the fall. I think it's still hovering around there. Versus 22,000 when...”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the shadows of that conversation is this non-voting population. It's outside of politics, of children that at the time it was 16 million children growing up port in America that I don't care where you land on the political spectrum, you have to face a fact that they exist and they aren't there because of a choice they made or they just were there because that was what the lot that they got dealt and so My initial purpose was to focus on the children and write about a child for that very reason, to say let's just look at what it is to be poor as a child. And what you're up against. But the more I sort of dove into her after the series dove into her story to write a book, the more I saw that the adults and her family are also former children, those childhoods need to be understood that this is a sequence of childhood experiences that are”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit nervous about the political conversation that does happen around poverty because it is so centered on the adults. And it's always about either you're in the camp of, it's their fault, they're lazy, whatever, let's blame them, or you're in the camp of it's not their fault.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So wow, that is a great question. And I lived in the UK for a short time as a child, and I was struck by the clarity of the kind of class lines of class, right? That there was a lot of discussion around class. And my mother's from Chile, same thing. So class focused. And I remember just many years ago, this was when I was a teen. Believing that America was somewhat free of that, that this was a place that was harder to define specific classes. The mythology that you hear about America, that is ultimately a place of inherent meritocracy, what I think is clear is that it's a very polarized nation. that a lot of the debates are driven by class divides, even if that's not at the forefront of the conversation. And it's interesting because when I set out to write this story, I felt”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wants us to feel that she belongs and that she's entitled to the same American dream that a lot of people take for granted.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I do think, and I love those books you mentioned, and I do think That what we're talking about when we're talking about housing insecurity, food insecurity, homelessness is we're in a very general sense. We're talking about the idea of belonging. I think that's what this book is about at the end of the day. If you had to ask me how all of these themes interconnect, it's about who gets to belong to a place and who doesn't. And that place is a physical place. It's New York City, but it's also a metaphorical place that could be understood through politics, through economics, through social structures. It's a place in America that still feels different for people of color more than 50 years after the civil rights movement, more than 50 years after President LBJ declared a war on poverty that still is a place of disadvantage. And so I think what Dasani”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what's specific to New York, aside from it being a city that everyone has, no matter where you are in the world, some sense of, it might have been a flicker of something from a movie or it could have been one of the best trips or the worst trips of your life. It's a city that is, I think, emblematic in so many ways of different aspects of culture and experience and nationalities across the world. In fact, everyone can be found to be living in New York. It's a global city. Unique to it is the fact that there is this legal right to shelter. And so I think it allows us to see in a more concentrated way the experience of what it is for these homeless families to be living in this way versus in places where they don't have that benefit. And therefore are more often doubled up. It's slightly less. Sort of in people's vision. It's unseen.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I met her is now hell bent on becoming an excellent realtor. And the way she put it was, I love looking at homes. I love seeing them empty and then seeing them filled. Floors, the sinks, the and she's always been interested. This is part of the reason she loved the show Criminal Minds was the crime scenes which show you these homes and these giant walk-in closets and she would watch this show from her crammed room in the shelter, but she found it fascinating how other people lived. So wouldn't that be amazing if she actually brought that to fruition? And I believe she'll do whatever she sets her heart on.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is on an upswing. This is what she says of herself. And she finally agreed to speak with for the BBC, which will be airing, I don't know when, but she has stayed very quiet because she's felt that she wasn't ready to speak. And so she's kind of been enjoying watching all of these events and she'll probably watch this one. But her words to that person and also just in general are, you know, I'm doing the best I can. And there's ups and downs. My life has been a roller coaster all along, but it's a little less of a roller coaster now. She's the first person in her family to graduate from high school, the first to enroll in college. She wants to go into real estate. This is the latest interesting development. I find her fascinating. I will always find her fascinating. A homeless kid whose entire existence was defined by her lack of a home in the very beginning.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it needed to end. But I think you learn so much in the writing process. You learn what you don't know. So it's important to not wait too long because as you write, you see the holes and you have to go back and try your best to film. Fill them.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then something's wrong. So I didn't feel ready to write for a few years because so many things just kept happening. And one thing I'll tell you is I did write the ending of this book on three different occasions and all three endings are in the book. They're just chapter endings. The one I read at the beginning of this conversation was I thought the end in 2017, but then more kept happening and it created deeper sort of new levels of understanding or it beckoned me into new threads of history or policy. And I just felt that I had to keep going. And I did, it's not so much when did you know it was time to start writing so much as when did you know it was time to stop? And I think at a certain point, it just felt like if I didn't stop, the story wouldn't see the light of other readers of day, right?”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a great question. It's funny. I sort of wish I could have jumped into the future and been listening to this podcast in my former self a year or two in after the series had run. I had great moments of panic of just feeling that this book is about everything. It felt like it was about so many things. It is about so many things. I think that looking back on those moments, that that was the right thing to feel. And I think if we're not very nervous about complicated subjects that we are tasked or have”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So If you think about the origins of that word, I think it comes from a sociologist from the UK, actually. This is in my notes, so I'll have to look this up after her name escapes me, but she coined this decades ago. And the word itself comes from Gentrice, which one read of that word is of noble descent. So it does suggest that nobility has arrived. So right there you have divisiveness, whether it's class race, usually both. I do think it has resulted for sure in segregation. We see this in New York City schools, we see this in housing, we see all kinds of division in American life along the lines of class and race.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell the biggest stories of our day. And I think this is one of them. And every one of every background should be on this story.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thank you. Yes, you reminded me because you had asked about George Floyd. The end of that story that I was telling earlier is when that happened, there were periods like years where I would say to Chanel, I think this is fascinating. I'm glad we've gotten to the bottom of the story of your ancestors. I just hope someone reads this to, oh my God, this has suddenly become a critical issue in American public discourse. And then it is fair to ask, and I think you did ask me this last time we spoke, you know, the question and maybe someone else is asking, you know, what gives you, Andrea, the right to tell this story. And my feeling, my response to that is that I don't have the right to tell the story, that it is my duty to tell the story. It is not my right. It is my duty as a journalist because what we're called to do as journalists is to”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Should always be on the mind of the journalist. I think that's number one. We need to be constantly wrestling with what our work is or isn't doing. And are we delving deeply enough? I think that it is about ultimately doing Justice to the work, right? To the story that is before us, to grappling with it as deeply as possible, to reading as many books as you can in order. Sometimes I would read a whole book just to write a paragraph in this book. And I think exploitation is a kind of cursory treatment of a subject in service of some kind of escape that then benefits the person who told the story but leaves the other people behind. And I think I've tried, labored very hard against every single one of those things.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She has it both ways. She wants to be able to thrive, to transcend poverty, to succeed, but in her own cultural context, she doesn't want to have to leave. She wants success to come to her part of America. And she's working on it now. She's in college, and I'm sure people are going to ask more about her. So I'll let the questions happen.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask ourselves why so many children who are just as capable and just as talented don't actually succeed in making it out. And I think that that's where this book turns the sort of traditional narrative of escaping poverty to some other place on its head because we are forced to reckon with how much greater the barriers are than one child's potential and also Dasani's own notion of success, which Hershey helped her figure out, hey, I got some new skills there. I learned to be an excellent debater. I learned to feel confident in front of an audience of white people so much so that this is not another spoiler. I can tell you she got up in a courtroom towards the end of the book and made her own case for why she should be reunited with her mother. That I don't think would have happened had she not been practicing those very skills at Hershey. The thing is that she wants it both ways and why shouldn't”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Taught to speak differently and to behave differently in a way that made her feel like she had to choose between her culture, her family, her roots, all of which she's proud of, and this other America. And in that other America, you wind up in a different place geographically, you own a home, you have a thriving career, you maybe you get married, all the markers, you have no more than maybe three kids. It's all containable and sustainable. And you've arrived into the middle class and you've departed, you've left behind this other world. We love those stories because they let us off the hook. It's like, oh, thank God, you know what? If you just work hard enough, this is the American myth. I think if you work hard enough, if you are talented enough, you can transcend anything. There are cases where this happens and those stories should totally be celebrated. But we rarely...”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think that if you were writing this as a novelist, I think you would have gone exactly in the direction that this went because it's more interesting. This was not a clich ⁇ what you said, what you articulated, Alex was. What Dasani herself hoped for when she went there, of course, she wanted something better. Which he found when she was there was that she was being”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That Dasani and her siblings were removed from the home, 93% of the kids, thousands of kids in New York City who were in that system facing those accusations were there just on neglect issues, not abuse. And yet there's this idea that in the foster care system, once they've been removed and put in foster care, it's because those kids needed to be saved because they were leaving horrible abusive things. Not the case for most cases. And it's a population that is disproportionately black or brown. And so I think it's a really, really important major issue.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Get caught up in the system are facing neglect, accusations. And we know that so often the root of these problems that lead to neglect is poverty. And so there is this growing consensus that really it's the poverty of these families that's being criminalized. And it's also just astounding because this is a system that does not provide parents with a reading of their rights that has the unchecked power for the most part of removing a child from a parent's home. I can't imagine a kind of greater power in any context than that than to remove a child. We know what that kind of trauma that brings. So to do that without due process, without a really strong system of due process is just what's happening. And it happens again and again. And the years.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I think America historically has responded to poverty by separating children from their parents. We've seen this through time. In its current manifestation, what it looks like in this system, which is the child protection system, which is a federally mandated system, but that plays out on the ground at the state and city level. So agency by agency, it sort of somewhat varies, but there's basically the same experience across America, which is that you as a parent can be accused of abuse or of neglect or sometimes both. Abuse, we know what that is. That's intention to harm. Neglect is about failure. It's about failing to provide. It's failure to provide adequate shelter, adequate clothing, adequate food. It is sometimes adequate supervision as well because you might be struggling with alcoholism or drug addiction. The vast, vast majority of families”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And what I saw was the added fear, the added layer of being a person of sort of suspect. That's how she felt because for her as a black woman, she was a target. The people in those emergency rooms, nurses and doctors, are mandated by law to report any suspicion of abuse or neglect. And so she had to answer all the right questions. She was the one answering questions, not asking them. And I think that that kind of repeated exposure to this other reality is so important. I think it's what I hope people get from reading this book is what that's like just to be in her shoes. She always says, don't judge me unless you've walked a mile in my shoes.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Change the outcome of certain things I was experiencing. I mean, this is a very personal thing, but I think before I started truly embedding in the life of Chanel, this black mom with all of these kids who was constantly dealing with all these various systems and standing in line with her, going to the emergency room with her, I didn't see this sort of unspoken privilege that I was experiencing as a mom in the emergency room with my child. One of my two kids is very accident prone and she's broken bones skateboarding and doing other things. And her dad and I would go into the emergency room and we were like reporters, you know, like boom, boom, boom, boom, asking all the questions that you ask because you want your kid to be okay. And are you getting that right x-rays? And starting in 2015, actually 2014, I started going into emergency rooms because that was medical care for Chanel. Somebody was having an asthma attack. That's where you went.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can then see how this sort of foundational, the roots of Dasani's poverty in that story. Because so much of white wealth in this country is built on this intergenerational safety net that begins with the making of the middle class. And we were talking about real estate earlier, the ability for white Americans in the 40s to go to the suburbs, not be kept out by restrictive covenants to go there and buy homes with loans and create wealth that would be passed down generations to the point where today the latest study I saw is that median wealth among white people in America is 10 times the amount that it is among black Americans. And so this was a very, very important thing. And I think for me personally, it just got me really thinking all the time about the even just The way in which my own skin color.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make it relevant to their current lives in the way that they felt it was relevant. And that history took me to Dasani's great-grandfather, June Sykes, who had fought in World War II. And his great-great-grandfather was a man named David, who had been born enslaved. And so we did locate the, we were able to be able to bring that to life and show how June got his ticket out of the Jim Crow South by going and fighting abroad, fighting the Nazis abroad, even though there was such deep segregation at home and returned home and found himself unable to benefit from the things that white veterans were benefiting from, the ability to buy a home, to start a business with a loan. These avenues were closed off to black veterans for the most part. And he was stuck in the project.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And something that I felt was so important to them. And as a journalist, you must follow where the story leads you that I wanted to trace that history. In fact, Chanel would always talk about how she had red hair because it must have come from her enslaver. Well, who were her family's original enslavers? Who were they? And so that took me down the path working with a genealogist. And for years, we were kind of just trying to figure out what this history was to be able to tell it because it was really important to them. And also, I think”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so interesting that you zero in on this in this conversation. I'm very grateful for this question. From day one, Chanel and Supreme eventually, when he started to trust me and talk to me, but also Dasani and others, made it their greatest project to educate me in what was then very much the unseen history of racism in this country. And of course, there's something I'd thought about and even, you know, grappled with in my own reporting before, but never deeply. It was necessary with them. It was a very, very important thing to talk about. It was like history was alive within them every moment of the day. We would pass a sign or we would look at it. We were driving once past the neighborhood that had a colonial kind of architecture, one of the houses. And I remember Chanel saying, that looks like what a plantation would look like. It was just a constant, constant thing.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think there's an entire, there's a whole other book to be written about Supreme, and I have encouraged him to write it. I think he should write it.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New family that they wanted to create to repair the past. And yet the structural racism, which when he started to really cooperate and help me tell his story by filing freedom of information acts and getting thousands of records to detail his encounter with various systems, we could actually show the kinds of ways that this plays out on the ground for someone like him, where Even just cultural misunderstandings end up hurting him. For instance, it is common in his culture of the 5% to say the black man is God. And he would sometimes say, I am God. And there was an intake worker who decided that he was psychotic, that he actually believed he was God versus understanding that this was actually just, he may believe that, but not because he's psychotic. It was a part of his belief system and there's a literature behind it and he quotes it.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tried to explain the different phases of his life. And at the same time, I think he's just person who has suffered so much as a child, whose sister died in front of him, and whose parents were addicted to heroin and who lost his family because of the same system and wound up very much lost and then found a new life with his, in his marriage to Chanel, Dasani's mother. And they kind of formed this.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Black people were superior, and therefore I don't. Anyone who's white, you can't trust. So he didn't actually speak to me, I think, for the first year. But he was a very curious and intellectually open and insatiable person. He was always reading. And he started reading my stuff. it became of interest to him to engage in dialogue with me and he then really participated deeply in this even though he had and what my skin color represented became a very vital part of the conversation and our histories and this nation's history and the divide it became a really important vehicle for giving words to history and he read the book he was very pleased with how you know how carefully i grappled with these issues and”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Been in prison early. He'd been caught up in the war on drugs and landed a big sentence when he was 17, but they thought he was 18. And then educated himself and got a diploma from prison, came out, tried to reform himself, found that through religion, but also found it in this culture around his religion, which was the 5%, which is an offshoot of the nation of Islam, and was very focused on When I met him, I mean, part of the difficulty, of course, is so much of his ideology is to cast the white person as the devil and to its own form of just, it's, he would say this, and he said this to me, it is black supremacy. If you talk about white supremacy, this was.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So supreme like Chanel and like many adults in this book show us what it means to be adults walking around the world whom people easily disrespect because they're out of work or because they're homeless or because they struggle with addiction when what those people who are judging them don't see is that Supreme and Chanel are former children and those childhoods matter just as much as Dasanis in forming who they are. And I think he's actually, I would say hands down one of the most complex people, probably the most complex person I've ever had to try to write about. Every time I thought I'd figured out Supreme, he would surprise me and he's just such a fascinating person on so many levels. This is a guy who”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Townhouses that were selling for millions and these fancy shops with boho chic clothing and just the two worlds just right there in the same space. Chanel was constantly curious. This was a conversation, not a one-way street. This was a dialogue where she would say something, I would respond, she would respond, and that's how I grew to learn more deeply about her and was able to render her, I hope, as a very three-dimensional person in this world.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Given fueled me, Alex Kotlowitz says there are no children here about Chicago and the projects in the 80s. Adrienne Nicole Blancs, their random family, which is about the Bronx in the 90s, those were siloed communities where there had not yet been this return to the city that we're now seeing, not just in the United States, but all over. And this, of course, happened in London as well as the educated classes or upper class folks are trying to look for deals and they turn neighborhoods into something else. And the people who remain in those neighborhoods tend to be those who are there because they don't have to necessarily pay rent. So they don't get priced out. And so in Fort Green Brooklyn, what you see is these two massive public housing projects. And in the middle of them, this shelter. And that was Dasani's world, but it was just blocks from the...”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The wealthy feel that they don't have enough. It's one of those cities that never fails to make you feel like there's a better life just out of reach. Every single person. But this is a family for whom everything was out of reach. And they were living right there in front of it because the wealth had come to their part of Brooklyn. And I think that that's what makes it a kind of that is actually what's new about the story when you look at the canon of works that I so admire or that have”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About Street Cred. And then when she wanted to throw me a compliment, she would say that my street cred was backup in the hood because everyone liked me-man. But I mean, I was this imposter. I was this outsider. And I think the thing that created a bond from the very beginning was the fact that despite all of our differences of class background, skin color, of just everything about our lives was so different. We were both moms. And I think, you know, she wants, at one point, said to me, I wouldn't have let you near my children if you weren't a mother. But that is also the precisely one of the things that became so challenging for me because of course any human would care so much about these kids being around them. And so to then go home to my very different reality. Certainly everything should be contextualized. I wasn't going home to a fancy apartment with a doorman. I was a renter. I'm married to a journalist. Was married at that time to journalists. And so in our own, everyone in New York, I think this sleeping place.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was and remains a very important relationship to me because it was entirely about my desire as a reporter to illuminate her story, which didn't have a platform or an audience and deserved it. But it also became just an incredible human experience to encounter her, to know her world. She took me into her world almost in the beginning as a tour guide and never failed to make fun of me for all of my mistakes. I would drop my pen or I would, she just thought I would have the worst poker face she's ever seen in the hood and on the street. You have to really, you know, just not show your emotions. Don't show what you're thinking. And Drea, you show it all in your face and you're ruining my street cred and you're ruining you don't even have street cred and now you're ruining mine. We had a long conversation.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About all these systems that they were interacting with and how those systems work. And also just about something that I know is of interest to you, Alex, because we've talked about this. But, you know, how do you define what thriving is? What does it mean to transcend?”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That they have something that's very, very valuable to society, that if they were to allow that story to be told, they could see potentially effect change. The series ran and it did affect change. More than 400 children were removed by the city from substandard shelters. And those shelters were forever closed to children. So that was an immediate sign that, you know, their story had power. just wanted to keep following them because what was clear to me even though this was a 30 000 word five-part series that constituted a pretty deep look by newspaper standards to me it was only scratching the surface that there was so much more to learn by being with them about everything about our nation's history about the way that systemic racism plays out on the ground”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I started following Dasani and her family's life, which was a hard sell because it always is to immerse, to say, let me just be around you for, I don't know how long, maybe a few months. I want to do a deep portrait of what it is to be struggling with these problems. Can you let me inside? Most sane people and they were among them would say no. Why would I allow my privacy to be invaded? But they read my work and I'd been doing this for a long time. And in a community that they cared a lot about, which was the Muslim immigrant community in the United States, I had embedded in a mosque for six months. I had done a number of deep dives, as we call them. And I think they saw that I was serious and that it wasn't going to be a superficial treatment of their story. And they believed in the power and the importance of their story. And I think that that is, that does tend to be what convinces people a lot of the time to let you.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kid, and I started poking around and I saw that there was this huge, it was like a buried news story, that there were these 22,000 kids. It wasn't front and center. It wasn't, and to me that was just also shocking. Like, why isn't this on the front page all the time? I mean, it's stunning. So I think the problem that's in plain sight that we all get used to. And in terms of economics, I mean, I think it is about the incredibly costly reality of housing and how hard it is for people to become homeowners when they don't have great wages or benefits in a country that, you know, where the livable, there isn't a livable wage for many working class folks. And so much goes to just staying housed. And that's a really tenuous situation.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's been building for decades, you know. So the book walks through some of this history. I don't think it's a new problem. It is just, in fact, when I began looking for a child to write about, I wasn't looking for a homeless kid. I was looking for a poor kid because I was stunned by the statistic that one in five children were growing up poor in America, which is one of the wealthiest, if not the wealthiest nation in the world. It's the superpower, one of the place that prides itself on, you know, on all the things that the American so-called dream is supposed to be about. Yet we have one fifth of our future workforce growing up at such a disadvantage that they are way more likely to wind up incarcerated, pregnant as teens, dropping out of school, all of the markers that lead to really costly problems down the line. And so I was shocked by that and I wanted to find”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It out of its root with pull it away from its roots and put it in new soil repeatedly. It experiences something called root shock. And I think that this is the kind of tragedy that we see unfolding with the homeless children in this country is. Everyone knows how stressful it is to move. So imagine just constantly having to move, constantly having to adjust to new sounds, smells, a different train station, a different classroom.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That creates a huge self-restrain, but it also is not a welcome, a friendly system. It's quite a punitive system. It's supposed to be temporary. And so in that system of hundreds of shelters, at the time that I met Jasani, there were over 22,000 children living in those shelters. I mean, that's the kind of crowd that would fill a football stadium. Just to give you a visual, it's a huge population. It's a very insecure life. It's a life of constant displacement, of being uprooted and put in another. One of the greatest descriptions I ever came across, it's actually in the book, was by an academic named Mindy Fully Love who describes serial displacement as root shock is what happens to a plant when you”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there's a huge affordable housing crisis in the United States. Less than 3% of Americans have access to federal programs, the federal government's programs that are things like public housing, Section 8 vouchers, the things that can enable you to live free of the stress of the rent burden, which is when so much of your income goes to paying the rent. And evictions have been a long-standing problem, of course. So we see homelessness taking different forms across the country. You've probably seen some of the news stories about the tent, encampments, and cities in California where the weather allows for that in New York City. It's a little different because due to lawsuits over several decades, there is a right to shelter. And so people have a legal right to be sheltered and the city must provide shelter if you can prove that you're homeless.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Literary pursuits and journalism come together is I wanted people to feel transported into the story, to feel moved by it, so much so that maybe it felt like fiction, but then they were constantly reminded it was real. And so they had to care about something that was really happening in this world. But the voice is hard. And I didn't want it, I didn't want it to feel showy. I wanted my favorite writers are spare and they're very economical. And they get out of the way of the story.”
2022-02-11 · Intelligence Squared · Survival and Hope in New York City, with Andrea Elliott · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT